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Seattle: The Resurgence of Rainier Beach High School and the Comeback Kids

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2018 //
5

The National Education Policy Center reported on the success of a high school in Seattle that adopted the principles of “schools of opportunity.” Open the link for sources and other links. Valerie Strauss posted an article about the school here.


These Comeback Kids Don’t Bake Cookies: The Community-Based Transformation of an Urban School

You could call it the comeback kid.

In 2010, Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School was on the edge of closure. Just 320 students occupied a building constructed to serve nearly four times that number. Its on-time graduation rate of 48 percent was among the lowest in the state of Washington.

Fast forward to today and the picture has completely changed. Enrollment exceeds 700. The graduation rate is 89 percent. And, unlike many other school turnarounds that superficially look successful, the school has continued to serve the same families and community. At Rainier Beach, nearly three-quarters of the students hail from low-income families, and 40 percent come from immigrant or refugee backgrounds. The school’s diverse population is 49 percent Black, 26 percent Asian, 14 percent Hispanic, six percent multi-racial, three percent White, and two percent Pacific Islander/Native American/Alaskan.

In 2016, NEPC recognized Rainier Beach as a School of Opportunity, making particular note of the school’s rigorous but supported classes and its thoughtful and powerful community outreach.
Too often, transformations like Rainier Beach’s are attributed to external forces such as state accountability measures or the introduction of a new and charismatic leader.

But in a recent article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Educational Administration, Ann M. Ishimaru, an associate professor of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Policy at the University of Washington’s College of Education, uses interviews, document analyses, and observations to tell a very different tale about Rainier Beach.

Truth be told, some aspects of the Rainier Beach story are not out of the ordinary. It brought in new leadership. It struggled with and benefitted from the implications and resources associated with accountability-based reforms.

But another part of the school’s story is indeed unusual—and offers important lessons for other schools now struggling to improve. Professor Ishimaru traces the school’s transformation to a groundswell of activism led by local families, students, and community members. Working together with educators, these activists were able to benefit from structures of conventional schooling by transforming those structures to better suit their needs. As Ishimaru notes, these were practices and institutions often imposed on low-income, “majority-minority” communities—structures that often do little to engage those communities or respond to their voiced needs.

For example, activists leveraged the power of the PTA, using it to spark change. As one parent leader explained:

We don’t make cookies. We’re not here to fund raise for your school. We’re here to be transformative change agents for the school. We need you to deploy us to spaces that you can’t get to, like School Board meetings and the Superintendent […] No, we don’t make cookies. […] We infiltrate, that’s right.
Other community-based strategies Ishimaru identified included:

Participating in the accountability-based school turnaround/school improvement grant process;

Holding community “cafes” to build support for the school’s new International Baccalaureate program; and

Supporting academic and behavioral interventions (such as introducing Freedom Schools and hiring a restorative justice coordinator) that empower youth.

“This study is a testament to the changes that can unfold when parents and communities drive priorities and action in school change efforts,” Ishimaru concludes.

Still, she cautions that work remains to be done at Rainier Beach: Key community leaders have moved on. Parents worry that African American students are still under-represented in the school’s International Baccalaureate program. And there’s no guarantee that the program itself will continue to attract the resources it needs to operate.

Categories Education Reform, National Education Policy Center, Parents, Seattle, Turnaround Schools

Long Island Is the Opt-Out from Testing Epicenter of New York

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2018 //
14

The test results are in from last March-April in New York. 85% of all 718 school districts in the state did not meet the federally mandated 95% participation rate in the state tests.

18% of the 950,000 eligible students did not take the tests at all. That’s 210,000 students who said no.

Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island, reports:

Long Island is opt-out central for New York, laying claim to 19 of the 20 school systems statewide with the highest numbers of students boycotting standardized tests, a Newsday analysis shows.

Upstate, the movement has gained a foothold, too, but still isn’t as popular as it is in Nassau and Suffolk counties, the review found.

The biggest boycotts draw students mostly from middle class communities in Suffolk. Comsewogue and Rocky Point, for example, had opt-out rates higher than 80 percent. Commack, Eastport-South Manor and Middle Country had rates of more than 65 percent.

Of 100 districts statewide with the highest numbers of test refusals, 70 are on the Island. All have opt-out rates of 45 percent or higher, according to the analysis. Statewide, opt-out rates averaged 18 percent. The average for the Nassau-Suffolk region stood about 50 percent.

Newsday reviewed the test results in English Language Arts and mathematics, released in late September by the state Education Department. More than 950,000 students in grades three though eight took the exams, while more than 210,000 opted out. Of those who boycotted the tests, more than 90,000 live on the Island.

The opt-out movement, now in its sixth year, appears most successful in middle class communities, which political experts attribute largely to close contacts there between parents and teachers. Many live in the communities; they have children in school and they carry weight with parents when they express doubt about the benefit of state exams. And educators belong to strong unions, which have pushed hard to keep student scores from being tied to mandatory teacher evaluations, the experts said.

The state offered threats and bribes, but to no avail.

Opt out is alive and well on Long Island and parts of upstate New York, driven by parents, not teachers.

Every year the eighth grade ages out. Every year, a new group of third graders is eligible. The fact that the movement has persisted and drawn roughly one-Fifth is a testament to parent power.

Why do parents opt out? They understand that the tests are not diagnostic and serve no purpose other than to compare their children to other children, a function of no value to the children.

Hats off to NYSAPE, New York State Allies for Public Education, which has led the opt out movement.

Categories Education Reform, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Testing

New York Releases Tests, Six Months After Students Took Them

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
34

The New York Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department remain firmly committed to the testing regime that has aroused so much parent rebellion and produced no gains on NAEP for 20 years. The state always finds good news in the test scores, but NAEP has been consistently flat.

Opt outs declined by a percentage point, but still nearly one of every five eligible students did not take the tests.

Long Island continues to be the epicenter of the opt out movement. About 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties did not take the tests.

Federal law (the “Every Student Succeeds Act”) says that parents have the right to opt out if their state permits it, but at the same time requires that every school must have a 95% participation rate or face sanctions–a flat contradiction.

New York has not yet clarified how it intends to punish the high-performing schools on Long Island where half the students didn’t take the tests.

This article appeared in Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island.

The number of students boycotting state tests has declined slightly statewide, but Long Island remains a stronghold of the opt-out movement, state officials announced Wednesday.

The state Education Department, in a media advisory, said the percentage of students in grades three through eight opting out of exams last spring dipped to 18 percent, down from 19 percent in 2017 and 21 percent in 2016. Tests, which are mandated by federal law, cover English Language Arts and mathematics.

The advisory provided no specific percentage for Nassau and Suffolk counties, but did note that the bicounty region “remains the geographic area with the highest percentage of test refusals in both mathematics and ELA.” Newsday’s own surveys of Island districts last spring found boycott rates of nearly 50 percent.

Among students who took the tests statewide, 45.2 percent scored at the proficient level in English, and 44.5 percent in math, the education department reported. Agency officials said results could not be compared with those from prior years because the format of last spring’s tests was sharply revised.

Total testing days in the spring were reduced to four, down from six in prior years, in an effort to provide some relief for parents and teachers who had complained the assessments were too stressful.

New York’s opt-out movement has proved the biggest and most enduring in the nation. The movement first appeared on Long Island in 2013, then exploded statewide two years later, and has remained especially strong in Nassau and Suffolk, and in some suburbs of Westchester County and the Buffalo area.

On the Island, more than 90,000 students in grades three through eight refused to take the state English Language Arts exam in April, representing nearly 50 percent of those eligible, according to Newsday’s survey of Island districts at the time.

Across New York, the number of students boycotting the state tests from 2015 through 2017 has hovered near 200,000 of 1 million eligible pupils in each of the past three years.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

Los Angeles: A Father Fights to Save His Neighborhood Public School

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2018 //
22

Torr Leonard, a father of a kindergarten student at the Gault Street Elementary School, was frustrated because so many of his neighbors were sending their children long distances to attend magnet schools or charter schools. He has made it his mission to tell them about their neighborhood public school.

When Torr Leonard moved into his Lake Balboa neighborhood five years ago, he discovered nearly every parent on his street sent their children to schools other than the neighborhood school a block away.

Leonard said he found that just one other nearby family sent their children to Gault Street Elementary, where his son Luc, started kindergarten last month. So, he has made it his mission to advocate for the school and encourage parents to re-think their decision to send their children to magnet or charter schools blocks — or even miles —away from their San Fernando Valley neighborhood.

“Why not try to market this school to the neighborhood to get people to actually send their kid there,” Leonard said in an interview.

Too bad that public schools do not have budgets for marketing, like the charter industry, which sucks public dollars away from public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Parents, Privatization, Supporting public schools

New York: Commissioner Elia’s Misleading Description of State Tests

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
17

New York State Commissioner of Educatuon MaryEllen Elia defended the state tests in a letter to the editor of an upstate newspaper.

What was interesting was what she did not say.

She wrote:

Your recent editorial “Benefits of Regents testing still unclear” (“Another View,” Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Aug. 28) is riddled with inaccurate information about New York’s student testing requirements. For the benefit of your readers, I am writing to set the record straight.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education approved New York’s Every Student Succeeds Act plan. It reflects more than a year of collaboration with a comprehensive group of stakeholders throughout the state. Approval of our plan by USDE ensures that New York will continue to receive about $1.6 billion annually in federal funding to support elementary and secondary education in New York’s schools. Had we not received federal approval, that money would have been left on the table, to the great detriment of our students and teachers.

Over the past three years, I have communicated frequently with the USDE about test participation rates and the importance of not penalizing schools, students or anyone else when a district’s participation rate falls below the federally required level.

The editorial states that in June the Board of Regents adopted regulations to implement the state’s ESSA plan — leading your readers to believe, erroneously, that these regulations are now final. In fact, the implementing regulations are temporary. We continue to make changes to the regulations based on the many public comments received.

We anticipate the Board of Regents will discuss these comments and proposed modifications to the draft regulations at its September meeting. The revised regulations will again go out for comment before they are permanently adopted. We hope your readers will participate in this ongoing public comment process.

Your editorial also is misleading in its claim that releasing state test results in September “makes the testing data nearly useless for school districts.” Here are the facts. In early June, schools and school districts were able to access instructional reports for the 2018 state assessments. At the same time, the department released about 75 percent of the test questions that contribute to student scores. The instructional reports, together with the released test questions, are used by schools and districts for summer curriculum-writing and professional development activities. Additionally, while statewide test results are not yet publicly available, we have already provided districts with their students’ score information. Districts can — and should — use this information to help inform instructional decisions for the upcoming school year.

The state Education Department’s stance remains unchanged: There should be no financial penalties for schools with high opt out rates. We continue to review the public comments on this and other proposed regulations, and those comments will be carefully considered as we finalize the state’s ESSA regulations.

Ultimately, it is for parents to decide whether their child should participate in the state assessments. In making that decision, though, they should have accurate information. I hope this letter gives them a better understanding of the facts.

MaryEllen Elia
Albany
The writer is state commissioner of education.

I checked with teachers, and this is what they said.

The test scores are released long after the student has left his or her teacher and moved to a different teacher.

Most of the questions are released, but the teacher never learns which questions individual students got right or wrong.

The tests have NO DIAGNOSTIC VALUE.

The tests have NO INSTRUCTIONAL VALUE.

Apparently, it means a lot to Commissioner Elia to compare the scores of different districts, but that comparison is of no value to teachers, principals, or parents.

One middle school teacher said this to me:

“…the whole exercise is meaningless at the classroom level. Admins might look at the data when it comes to certain skills/content areas, but without looking at the questions/answers, it is not helpful for us in the trenches.”

Another teacher told me:

“…we do not get student-specific results for each question, we are supposed to look at statewide results and then somehow extrapolate that back to our classrooms, the following year, with different kids. So this is a BLUNT tool at best and students get no individual diagnostic benefit.”

The state tests are pointless and meaningless. They have no diagnostic value whatever for individual students.

Every parent in New York should understand that their children are subjected to hours of testing for no reason, other than to allow the Commissioner to compare districts. Their children receive no benefit from the testing. No teacher learns anything about their students, other than their scores.

The state tests are pointless and meaningless. They have no diagnostic value for students—or teachers.

OPT OUT.

OPT OUT.

OPT OUT.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students, Testing

New York Plans to Punish Students and Schools if Parents Opt Out: A Terrible Idea!

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2018 //
39

Gary Stern of the Lohud newspaper in the Lower Hudson Valley, a region where parents are passionate about their public schools, describes New York’s intention to punish students and schools if the opt rate is high.

The state insists that every child take the tests, no matter how invalid and unreliable they are. The children must be measured and labeled!

Stern writes:

“The school year just opened, so the annual state tests in math and ELA seem like a long way off. Testing for grades 3-8 begins in early April, when the Yanks and Mets will be starting next season.

“And yet, the state Board of Regents may soon pass new rules for holding school districts and individual schools accountable if too many families “opt out” of tests. One such rule would allow the state education commissioner to direct a district to spend a portion of its federal Title I funds on “activities” to increase student participation on state tests.

“This is a terrible idea. The Regents should balk.

“Schools use Title I funds on staff and programs to help disadvantaged students — targeting everything from math and reading intervention to supports for homeless children. Taking money away from such efforts for a parent-targeted p.r. campaign? Hardly smart education funding.”

This is a very mean-spirited, stupid idea. Why would the state take money away from the neediest kids to re-educate parents?

Note to the Regents and Commissioner Elia: The children belong to their parents, not to you. Read the Pierce decision (1925).

Categories New York, Opt Out, Parents, Students, Stupid, Testing

Texas: Houston Parent Says Her Child’s School is Exceptional, but State Calls It “Failing”

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2018 //
35

Sarah Becker, a parent in the Houston Independent School District, is thrilled with her child’s public school. It has exceeded her expectations. Yet the state claims it is failing. How can this be? Could it be that the ratings system is wrong? What do you think? Sarah says she will ignore the rating system but the state won’t. They might close her child’s school or even take over the entire school district for failing to do something dramatic to her school. Accountability hawks are no doubt eager to see Sarah’s school closed and handed off to a charter operator. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott would be happy to see the school closed and hand out vouchers to the students to attend a religious school. Sarah Becker says they are wrong.

A couple of weeks ago the Texas Education Agency (TEA) released their ratings of schools and school districts. I am the mother of two children at a school in Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest school district and the seventh largest district in the country. How did my kids’ school fare in this year’s accountability system? The school failed, receiving an “Improvement Required” rating.

Does that give me pause about sending my kids there? Not one bit and I’ll tell you why.

This past year was the first one my children spent at their elementary school. From the moment they set foot on campus, my children were accepted and loved. The physical environment of the school is welcoming, and they have a nice, new building with lots of natural light. And in a time when public school budgets are incredibly austere, my kids’ elementary school found a way to hire a PE teacher, an art teacher, a music teacher, a nurse and a social worker last year. To have all of those is incredibly rare in HISD-in fact, this elementary school was the only one within driving range of our home to offer those. It has a rooftop garden and a makerspace. And finally most amazingly, my children learned AN ENTIRE SECOND LANGUAGE last year. We literally dropped them into new classes having had almost zero exposure to Spanish and they ended the year speaking, reading and writing two languages. The progression has been amazing to watch. Their worlds are bigger and more beautiful because of their new school.

So how did such a great school end up being on the “improvement required” list? The system used to identify “failing” schools is unsound and inaccurate. It is based solely on how certain students perform on a single standardized test on a single day.

You have probably seen the meme floating around social media with the following quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” As cliché as that quote is, I find much truth in it when applied to our “accountability” system. If you judge every school by the standards of the TEA, some very successful schools will receive failing ratings not because they fail to educate, but because the accountability system demands that fish ride bicycles by making children conform to tests.

Which brings us back to my family’s experiences-no part of my kids’ experience at our school last year was a part of any accountability data.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that our school is not perfect—there is always room to grow—but how long do Texas students and teachers have to wait for an accountability system that is fair and looks at something other than narrow, flawed test scores which seem aimed to punish school communities that serve students in poverty? And, in an environment where the state legislature seems hellbent on increasing the stakes around standardized testing (see: state takeover of democratically elected school boards), schools are being asked to sacrifice increasingly more each year in the name of raising said test scores.

Lest I be accused of glossing over real problems, I am not suggesting that all public schools are perfect or even that our district has served all communities well. Quite the opposite. But if we focus only on bringing up test scores, we miss addressing the very real issues that are in front of us because test scores take up all the space.

Until this system is overhauled, I will continue to pay no mind to it and pay attention to the very clear evidence in front of me: my kids are excited to show up to school every morning and love their school. Their teachers are caring professionals. That is enough accountability for me.

Categories Accountability, Hoax, Houston, Parents, Texas

New York State Allies for Public Education to State Leaders: Don’t Punish Schools and Kids for Opting Out from Senseless Testing

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
22

New York State Allies for Public Education is an organization that represents 50 parent and educator groups across the state. It has led the opt-out movement in the state. This letter was written in response to punish schools where the “participation” rate in mandated testing fell too low. The very best response to the state’s threats and warnings would be to opt out; the more that parents opt out, the less likely it is that the state can “punish” them for exercising their constitutional rights.

Dear Board of Regents, Chancellor Rosa, Commissioner Elia and Dr. Lisa Long,

We find it reprehensible that under the guise of ESSA, NYSED is seeking to punish schools when parents exercise their legal right to opt their child out of the grades 3-8 state tests and is overreaching by requiring the collection of confidential student data. These proposed provisions of the New York State ESSA regulations show a blatant disregard for the amount of public outrage over the last several years regarding the flawed New York State testing system, unproven revised common core standards, and the unnecessary collection of personally identifiable student information.

Strong opposition to the grades 3-8 common core state tests has been evidenced by 20%- 22% of eligible students throughout New York opting out of these state exams over the past three years, despite threats from the state and individual districts and a one-sided state-initiated persuasion campaign (the Commissioner’s “Toolkit”).

Only 8% of school districts in New York met the 95% testing participation rate in 2017, and while the state has not yet released the opt out figures for the 2018 grades 3-8 tests, several news accounts reveal that the opt out number will remain high, and that the majority of school districts will not have met the 95% participation rate as a result.

In addition, it took a legislative act to stop NYSED and then-Commissioner John King from collecting personally identifiable student data in the name of inBloom, a $50 million database that was going to be used for corporate data mining purposes without parental consent.

The proposed New York ESSA regulations will allow the Commissioner to mislabel schools with opt out rates over 5% — including highly effective schools — as needing Comprehensive or Targeted Support and Improvement, with the potential of wrongfully identifying schools as needing these interventions. These proposed regulations allow the Commissioner to require schools to misuse Title I funds in an effort to increase test participation rates. Moreover, the proposed regulations allow the Commissioner to close these schools, and/or convert them to charter schools. This is a dangerous path for NYS to take.

The mere suggestion of using Title I funds for ‘marketing’ of these tests is a misuse of authority that results in the revictimization and intimidation of communities that have a long history of being underserved and disempowered. Furthermore, it should be regarded as a civil rights issue as these actions will disproportionately aim to quiet the voices of schools with high populations of students from low-income households which tend to correlate with families of color.

None of these proposed provisions are required by ESSA law, none of them will improve learning conditions or outcomes for our children, and all of them contradict earlier statements from the Board of Regents and NYSED officials that schools with high opt out rates would not be punished or otherwise targeted, and/or wrongfully labeled for interventions, etc. The intention of the 95% participation rate in the ESSA law is to deter institutional/systematic exclusion by schools not to usurp parental rights.

We strongly request that NYSED remove these provisions from the proposed regulations and refrain from punishing schools when parents assert their legal right to opt out of the state tests. Moreover, under no circumstances, should NYSED collect confidential, personally identifiable student data. The ESSA law does not require punishing schools for opt out; rather, it fortifies a parent’s right to opt out. Furthermore, the ESSA law does not require collecting individual student data for the purposes of accountability, nor should the Commissioner and NYSED.

Until NYSED embraces teaching our children through the lens of whole-child education and stop test-driven classrooms, we will continue to squander opportunities to truly help all children reach their full potential. It’s time we give the children of New York a meaningful, well-rounded education, and create a nourishing environment where children flourish because they genuinely love to learn.

Respectfully,

Lisa Rudley, Executive Director

Categories New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

New York: Don’t Punish Students, Parents, and Schools for opting Out of State Tests!

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
45

Send an e-mail today.

It is wrong for the New York Board of Regents and the State Education Department to Punish kids for opting out!

Children are not the property of the state. When the state abuses them by demanding that they sit for hour after hour of standardized testing, this is child abuse.

Parents have the right to say no.

Write today. Open the link to see a sample letter and addresses.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Opt Out, Parents, Students, Testing

Nancy Bailey: A Tribute to Dads who Love and Protect Their Children, at Home, in School, at the Border

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2018 //
10

Nancy Bailey reminds us how important dads are. A perfect message for Father’s Day.

They help their children at home and in school.

Some flee their native land and take risks to bring their children to safety in the home of the brave and free.

She has these words for them, at a time when national officials are citing Scripture to justify family separation.

“Parents Fleeing to America

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

~Mark 10:13-16

Categories Parents
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